Joel Harris on Worship

However, if we search God’s Word faithfully and look to mature Christians who possess wise insight, we will quickly see that worship is much more than songs. Worship is what we were created for, it’s what we’ll spend eternity doing, and it encompasses our hearts as well as our actions.

It also matters what we sing. It’s been established that our ungodly culture has low expectations for young people. But when it comes to worship, even the Christian community has low expectations for us. Worship songs targeted for kids, tweens, teens and young adults, have dumbed down the lyrical content because they think we’re too dumb to understand anything harder.

Sadly, in far too many cases this assumption is correct. Young people who don’t study their Bibles faithfully, who don’t read hard books, and who can’t sit through “grown-up” sermons, probably can’t comprehend the profound truths found in timeless hymns like And Can It Be That I Should Gain, or Rock of Ages.

Perhaps someone would say he is over-generalizing, but in a general, megachurch way, he’s right from what I’ve seen. And not just because And Can It Be happens to be one of my favorite hymns.

He goes on to list some musical artists who are writing modern-day hymns and the like. I’ve heard of a a few, but I’ll have to check out the others.